Moving on from BFing

Hi everyone, i am new to EB and this is my first post, I need advice please. I have an 8 and a half month old. He is breast fed. Never been bottle fed. I'm going back to work in mid jan and he will be going into childcare for the 2 days that I am at work. I have been trying to get him onto a bottle or sippy cup with formula for a couple of weeks now with no luck at all. He just doesn't want a bar of it. He claws at my clothes until he get some booby. I have a 3 and a half year old who went through the same thing at the same age and she was easy to ween off breast feeding. Straight onto the sippy cup, but my son is such a mummy's boy and it seems to be harder this time. I need some ideas on how I can get him onto a sippy cup or bottle. Thanks for your advice.

Have you tried expressing? Will he take breastmilk from a bottle or cup? What about water? It may be he doesn't like the taste of formula or could be that he doesn't like bottles. I never got DS to take a bottle of anything including breastmilk I know how stressful it is when you need them to and they get so upset by it all.

If he will take breastmilk are you able to express enough for those 2 days? If not you could try someone else giving the bottle with you not in the room. we had the most success with a small shot glass and me out of the house but even that took weeks to work up to.

I'd also talk to the staff at the day care centre, they probably come across this issue lots!

Has someone else tried? It's much harder for you to try to feed him with a bottle because he knows his preferred option is right there!

I also think that the daycare staff will be able to help out a lot with suggestions.

By the time my DS was ten months, he would have a morning BF, midday cup of EBM and a bedtime BF on the days he was in daycare. I could only manage to express once during the day at work. When I was at home, I would feed him four times a day. I didn't find my supply was affected (even given I'd had previous supply issues).

There are some really great threads in Feeding your Baby and Breastfeeding on how to get a baby to take a bottle, and how to manage return to work.

I haven't had to deal with this, so you can take my suggestion with a grain of salt, but ...have you tried offering a bottle/sippy cup at non-breastfeeding times? Eg: during mealtimes or playtimes? I'm just thinking that perhaps you can build up a 'good' association with the bottle/cup instead of the negative association of bottle=missing out on booby.

Hopefully he will take a bottle more willingly from someone else, when your boobs are not nearby! I know my boob-obsessed daughter was always much happier to take bottles from Dad than from me.

(Oh, and I know other mums have had success transitioning to forumula by offering half-EBM and half-formula, then increasing the formula proportion)

Don't worry about it. At that age he can breastfeed when you're there and eat solids and drink water when you're not. Ther's no reason to wean unless you actually just don't want to breastfeed any more.

I have a 10.5month old and I also work 2 days per week and he attends childcare. I have nev been able to express and my job means that expressing would be difficult.

He attended childcare from 7 months and I was lucky that I was able to pop in to feed him once a day until he was about 9 months.

After 9 months, I was no longer able to visit. But as he was pretty good with solids and would drink water from a drink bottle ( the most successful drink bottle was those 'pump' water bottles) I was not too stressed. He just skips the midday feeds those two days. I have not found any impact on my supply. He just seems to have a super big feed in the evening to make up for it.

I have no solutions, but share your problem OP! I also have a boob-loving 6 month old delight, and I'm returning to work full time. My plan is to start weaning him next week when DS is home as well. I'm going to drop a feed every couple of days, and stop BFing overnight so he doesn't decide to reverse cycle. Hopefully we can get to a happy 1-2 BFs per day. This all might be a disaster, but no one has been able to suggest a better plan to me. I just hope he relents and drinks EBM or formula when he gets hungry enough! We will see...

I'm just going through this now too as I go back to work in feb. My DS (6 months) wouldn't take a bottle at all- I began trying in October. Over the past 3weeks i started to try 2-3 times a day and he gradually went from screaming when you so much as put the teat in his mouth to starting to chew on it and spit out any liquid, and now finally this week he has began drinking from it properly and I've been able to drop one bf and feed him formula instead. It took a long time but we got there! I just used formula as it was too much work to express so often and have it rejected. Also after trying just about every bottle and teat combination plus various sippy cups, i just stuck to using the tommy tippy closer to nature bottles with a 2 or a 3 flow teat.

As others have said, try not to stress about it. My DD stopped taking a bottle at 13 weeks, and I returned to work when she was 6 months old. My DH (who was a SAHD) brought her to my work for a noon feed. DD is nearly 9 months old now, and my DH has returned to work so I can no longer feed her at noon time. No dramas, she seems to do fine having solids and water during the day, and a nice big breastfeed when I get home. The only downside is that she tends to wake up at night and feed, but she has always been a rubbish sleeper. Good luck!

"Hey, come here a second," my mum said as she replaced the book in my hands with a wooden spoon covered in what I prayed was red sauce. Together, we walked into the kitchen and hovered over the skillet like we were peering into a crystal ball. Looking into my future, I saw me eating a lot of take away.